A Belgian university recently banned all watches from exams due to the possibility of smartwatches being used to cheat. Similarly, some standardized tests in the U.S. like the GRE have banned all digital watches. These policies seems prudent, since today’s smartwatches could be used to smuggle in notes or even access websites during the test. However, their potential use for cheating goes much farther than that.

As part of my undergrad research at the University of Michigan, I’ve recently been focusing on the security and privacy implications of wearable devices, including how smartwatches might be used for cheating in an exam. Surprisingly, while there’s been interest in the security implications of wearable devices, the focus within the research community has been on how these devices might be attacked rather than on how these devices challenge existing social assumptions.

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